A grieving young woman finds herself grappling with monsters from another dimension on what may well be the end of the world in Starfish, an atmospheric new film from UK director A.T. White. Can she work through her grief to piece together the elements of a mysterious signal that may be the key to averting the apocalypse?
Starfish is very much about grief and loss, capturing the almost otherworldly aspect of the process. It's common to feel isolated and cut off from others, and there's an insurmountable distance Aubrey feels as she attends Grace's funeral yet struggles to connect in any meaningful way. The film makes that sense of isolation explicit when Aubrey wakes up the next morning to find she might be one of the last people left on Earth. And those seven mixtapes? They represent the seven stages of grief, according to White.